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In this paper, we discuss the production of visions for IT in Danish health care. Visions are not propagated “from above” but are produced through translation processes, in which contents change as they are inscribed in ministerial reports, leaflets or recommendations. This is illustrated by two cases: the electronic patient record at Hvidovre Hospital (HVEPS) and the Digital Doctor Project (DDP). Following STS‐studies we propose to analyse such reports as material agents with distinctive capacities and features. Prominent among those is the ability of such reports to carry “contradictory” messages. We analyse this capacity as a strength as it enables reports to bind together various people in various contexts, rather than as a weakness. We propose the concept of political moment as a tool that can capture the material heterogeneity and the unexpectedness of translations. The concept of moralising moment is introduced to identify accounts in which such processes are glossed or covered.

Over the past three decades, new off-grid electrification infrastructures – as micro-grids and other solar solutions – have moved from innovative initiatives, conducted by NGOs and private stakeholders, to a credible model promoted by international organizations for electrification of rural areas in developing countries. Multiple conditions support their spread: major technological advances in the field of renewable energies (panels, batteries), intensive Chinese industrial production allowing lower prices, institutional reforms in Africa including these solutions in major national electrification programmes, and, finally, an opening to the private sector as a supposed guarantee of the projects’ viability. However, while the development of this market calls for significant investments, a vast set of calculations and a strong “micro-capitalist” doctrine, all involved in their design, experts admit that a large proportion of projects hardly survive or even fail.

This chapter investigates these failures by exploring the ecology of such infrastructures, designed for “the poor.” It discusses “thinking infrastructures” in terms of longevity by focusing on economic failures risks. The authors argue that the ecology of the infrastructure integrates various economic conversions and exchanges chains expected to participate in the infrastructure’s functioning. By following energy access solutions for rural Africa in sub-regions of Senegal and Madagascar, from their political and technical design to their ordinary life, the authors examine the tensions and contradictions embedded within the scripts of balance supposed to guarantee their success.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the phenomenon of innovation in a particular setting in Japan, and more specifically to trace a local initiative toward the creation of an “innovation ecosystem” in a large city and its surrounding region in Western Japan, with the aim of fostering entrepreneurship and economic revitalization.

The analysis in this chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork, including participant-observation in meetings and events held to promote entrepreneurship and collaboration in the region, as well as interviews with city officials, managers, and entrepreneurs related to the activities of the creation of the “innovation ecosystem.”

In the chapter, I show how the emergence of the ecosystem metaphor for business innovation informs practices and imaginaries in which relations, co-creation, and natural growth become central as models of and for innovation processes in a context of crisis, in ways that generate not only innovation but the ecosystem itself.

The chapter provides historical and social context to the metaphor of the innovation ecosystem that is receiving increasing interest globally, and provides insights into how innovation activities and the enacting of the “innovation ecosystem” take place in practice.

Despite the fact that recent anthropological interest in infrastructure has done much to illuminate the infrastructure asset as an assemblage of actors, technologies and ideas, an interdisciplinary approach is required to unpack how the infrastructure project comes together as an assemblage and to define the role that financial technologies and discourses play in shaping it. Here, an interdisciplinary approach is applied to a novel infrastructure asset, London's Thames Tideway Tunnel, in order to show how multiple actors and visions of the world are brought together to make the infrastructure asset come to fruition. The paper concludes that this interdisciplinary approach to infrastructure can allow us to keep multiple sides of the infrastructure project in sight simultaneously. This includes both the creation of a rhetorical vision and spectacle around the asset, and the underlying financial arrangements that bind it together. If we do so, we can understand how new infrastructural forms utilise particular financial technologies and ideas to change the relationship between the public and the private, and between consumers and providers, and act towards the creation of a new ‘public good’ that normalises private provision.